Following his brilliant revisitings of Tiny Tim (Mr. Timothy), Edgar Allan Poe (The Pale Blue Eye), and Eugène François Vidocq (The Black Tower), Louis Bayard takes us to Elizabethan England in the company of Walter Raleigh, Christopher Marlowe, and Thomas Harriot in this time-jumping thriller. In modern Washington, D.C., Henry Cavendish has been hired by collector Bernard Styles to find a missing letter dating from the 1600s, which may contain a practical formula for alchemy but will certainly prove the existence of the society dubbed the School of Night. Four centuries earlier, five scholars gather in secret to discuss God, politics, astronomy, and the black arts. But one of them, Harriot, has secrets of his own, which he shares only with Margaret, the housekeeper he has come to love.

"Bayard shifts smoothly between present-day America and Elizabethan England in this superb intellectual thriller. At the Washington, D.C., funeral of document collector Alonzo Wax, who committed suicide, Bernard Styles, an elderly Englishman and rival collector, approaches Henry Cavendish, an Elizabethan scholar and the executor of Wax's estate, whose academic reputation suffered grievous harm after he authenticated a new Walter Ralegh poem that was later exposed as a hoax.... The author's persuasive portrayal of undeservedly obscure real-life scientist Thomas Harriot, a member of the school, enhances a plot with intelligence and depth."—Publishers Weekly (starred review)